More on "Hire Juniors, Grow Seniors"
In the past, I've written about my hiring and team building philosophy, which I like to summarise as "hire juniors, grow seniors". In staffing discussions, I keep mentioning this, and frequently receive pushback from Engineering Leads and their Product counterparts that I'd like to summarise my responses to and thoughts about.
The most frequent arguments I’ve heard are that onboarding juniors takes longer, and that the technology new hires will be facing is so complicated that a senior is required.
On the first point, yes. Onboarding juniors takes longer. They are simply less experienced. The team that welcomes them has to bring them up to speed, and investing more time in that slows down the team. This is a fact that can’t be argued with. I want to challenge the perspective from which it’s used.
You can see onboarding time as necessary waste, and the extra time needed to onboard a junior as excess waste. “We could be so much faster.” The perspective here is that the team has one job, and that’s to deliver the next feature, or bug fix, you name it. People on the team can’t be bothered too much with onboarding, they want to get back to the job. The new team member - regardless of their seniority - is basically a unit that needs to fit in as fast as possible. The team is a gearbox, and all the parts need to move smoothly to perform their precise individual duties. When a part falls away, it gets replaced with the exact fitting spare part. Scale this to the organisation, and teams are exchangeable parts.
This perspective on onboarding, people, and eventually teams is rather sad. I prefer to see teams as places that provide growth opportunities. As mentioned in my previous post on the matter, a senior leaving means a growth opportunity for the next best person already on the team to step up and replace the one who left. This cascades down along the seniority levels to the (newly hired?) juniors. Onboarding, then, is just another way to provide a growth opportunity.
How does this growth happen? In part, by passing on knowledge and expertise. A senior leaves? As soon as that’s announced, handover to the successor begins. The senior’s successor will also give up some duties, and hands over to the next person. And so forth. Notably, this does not only have to happen when it’s clear that someone’s leaving. Sharing knowledge at all times ensures better overview of the systems a team is in charge of, more broadly shared expertise and, ultimately, more safety for the company by way of creating sustainable value. Circling back to onboarding, a team that constantly and habitually shares knowledge will treat onboarding as just another example of knowledge sharing.
The second point, our technology is too complicated for juniors to be able to grok it quickly, is actually related to the first in one way that I’ll get to after challenging the situation a bit. This will be a bit hard to swallow, but please bear with me.
Did I get that right? Our technology is so complicated that it takes a senior to grok it? Isn’t that embarrassing? Are we proud of overcomplicating things? That’s a problem, and we need to stop doing that. Don’t we have time to simplify things? That’s another one, please let’s talk about tech debt and making time for addressing it. Is stuff not documented clearly, and is it therefore too hard to grok it, and aren’t people willing to pass on that knowledge that’s in their heads? This one brings me back to the relation to point one above, as promised.
Complicated technology can be a result of people not talking enough. More active knowledge sharing will have the side effect of there being more discussions about solutions. Honest and healthy conflict about the best ideas will lead to better solutions, and that, here, means simpler ones. Or at least ones that more people understand. Which arcs right back to the question of onboarding speed.
Bottom line, onboarding time is time well and easily invested provided sharing knowledge and collaborating closely is a habit.
I will offer a third point in favour of hiring juniors that’s a bit more on the idealistic side. How well does the philosophy of hiring more senior people scale? Applying the categorical imperative, I can rephrase the question as What would happen if everyone preferred hiring seniors over juniors? At the team and company level, this doesn’t make much sense. As mentioned, this is about scaling - I’m thinking industry level.
People don’t start their careers senior. They start with a certain amount of skill and little experience, and learn as they go. It’s quite natural that there are more juniors than seniors in an industry. The seniority pyramid has that structure. Having the seniority pyramid upside down in an organisation (company, or team) is unnatural. If no one hired juniors, where would they learn?
It’s a matter of responsibility towards the greater industry to hire juniors and help them grow senior.
Tags: work